Rich Not Backbone of Free Enterprise
On its face, Anne Gelinas’ letter in your Jan. 6 issue [which was responding to “In Praise of the Free Market,” December 16, 2010] seems a persuasive defense of a free enterprise system. Rhetorical questions of the sort she used can be a clever ploy to persuade people that the true answers would support the writer’s line of argument. In Gelinas’ case, of course, they do not. People don’t get rich just because they are willing to take risks for large rewards. Large pharma and agribusiness firms, among many others, get huge government subsidies, generous tax breaks, and undeserved price supports.
People also get rich from ideas motivated by a desire to serve those in need. And many people who do difficult and dangerous jobs benefit very little from their sacrifices. In addition, when economic freedom is unfettered, the most powerful individuals and corporations exercise their freedoms to the point where the rest of us end up with very little freedom at all.
An old professor of mine was fond of saying that “bull baffles brains.” Gelinas served up a fair portion of bull. I trust that your readers will use their brains to see her arguments for what they are: libertarian propaganda.
Paul Cherulnik
Leeds
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No Flag Large Enough
Looking back over almost 20 years of letter writing… and now, unable to think about anything except our newest, nifty way of killing people with drones named “Predator” and “Reaper,” which carry bombs called “Hellfire missiles” that can, if need be, carry nuclear weapons (and surely contain that silent and most deadly material of all, “depleted” uranium), all controlled by what could be called children by old people like me, using computer games someplace in Nevada… it’s not easy to find any of the hope I had in 1990, when even then there wasn’t much at all.
Not only that, but since President Obama joined us, these Drones have become a weapon of choice, the production and the use of which has increased by about 50 percent, giving the entire scene something that simply can’t be real and must have been stolen from the world of science fiction.
Maybe all those dead blackbirds falling from the sky are trying to tell us something unspeakably sorrowful about the world. Like them, I don’t have the words any more. Perhaps I’ve just worn out the words that one needs when bogged down with sorrow over the world that we are (or perhaps are not) leaving our children.
So as we continue to murder men, women and children here and there around the world in the grab for profit, oil, natural gas, water and all the rest, I will use again the words of Kurt Vonnegut and Howard Zinn, who are both gone just when we need them.
In the book A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut wrote: “The biggest truth to face now… is that I don’t think people give a damn whether the planet goes on or not. It seems to me that everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.”
Kurt Vonnegut’s second name for his book about the bombing of Dresden (Slaughterhouse Five) was The Children’s Crusade, since those whom the powerful send off to war are indeed only children.
Howard Zinn told us, “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
Jane Newton
S. Londonderry, Vt.
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The Road Through the Serengeti
I haven’t seen a Valley Advocate in years, although I enjoyed working [there] back in the 1980s. Thought I would take a look on line, and voila, there is a short piece [“Eden and the Apple,” January 6, 2011] written by my old friend Stephanie Kraft concerning electrical use and pollution problems throughout the world.
[The] article goes from China to Tanzania and back to the U.S…. But there is a connection which you don’t mention. You failed to point out that our consumption of energy for use in air conditioning, on household appliances, on product fabrication and manufacturing in the U.S. has declined by more than the amount used on household computing. Yes, demand for electricity, not only in the U.S. but throughout the globe, will go up as the population increases and more people in the world want more of what we in the U.S. have—and have always taken for granted.
There is a connection to Tanzania and China. Who in the world do you think is paying for that road in the Serengeti? It certainly isn’t poor Tanzania. It is most likely China. China is very involved in Africa and they are experts at convincing governments to give them nearly carte blanche in exchange for large bribes and one or two public works projects. Then the Chinese set up factories in countries like Kenya, buy agricultural land in countries like Tanzania and extract minerals. By the way, they rarely employ local workers, many of whom are very talented, to work in their factories and other “business” operations. Instead, they bring cheap Chinese labor over and build encampments adjacent to the factories where these laborers live.
Do you think the Chinese care about pollution in the waterways of the Yangtze or its many tributaries, and the long-term effects it has upon their population? Do you think the Chinese don’t have an agenda to exploit the resources of Africa and other “developing nations”? Who do you think is behind the recent poaching of elephants in Kenya for ivory, a problem that was supposed to have disappeared decades ago? I’m sure you know the answers. China is very happy to fabricate most of the computers and electronic gadgets we use daily in the western world while really not caring about the global consequences.
David Gottlieb
via www.valleyadvocate.com
